Episode 261: Andy Springer on Top Sales Trends in Today’s Business Landscape Sales Enablement PRO Podcast

Shawnna Sumaoang: Hi, and welcome to the Sales Enablement PRO Podcast. I’m Shawnna Sumaoang. Sales enablement is a constantly evolving space, and we’re here to help professionals stay up to date on the latest trends and best practices so that they can be more effective in their jobs.

Today, I’m excited to have Andy Springer, the chief client officer at RAIN Group, join us. Andy, I would love for you to introduce yourself, and your role in your organization to our audience.

Andy Springer: Hi, everyone. Thank you very much for having me. I am Andy Springer, the Chief Client Officer at the RAIN Group. My role is one that each and every day I am a practitioner leading teams in terms of supporting large-scale sales transformations and also working with small, and medium-sized enterprises in terms of upscaling and developing sales skills that are going to shift the dial in terms of sales performance.

SS: Wonderful. The reason that we wanted to pull you on to this podcast is because RAIN Group actually recently released a study that identified some key trends in the current sales landscape. In your opinion, what are the trends that have the greatest impact on businesses and their ability to succeed in the current environment?

AS: Yeah, I would say that the trends that we saw through our research were a significant increase in terms of sales cycles. Opportunities are taking longer to close. There’s more complexity in terms of that. The amount of opportunities that are being led to a loss due to no decision. While there may be significant needs, significant problems to solve, and objectives to be supported to achieve, for whatever reason we’re seeing a lot of no decision being what they lost to instead of competitors.

I think the third one is selling in an uncertain economy. If you look at the post-pandemic world and you look at the political challenges that have impacted the market, you look at the shift in terms of the financial impacts in terms of the post-pandemic inflationary world and then how that’s changed the dynamics of the economy, it’s made it really challenging particularly in the B2B space, but not exclusive to. That uncertainty cascades uncertainty in terms of sellers and how they approach the market and what they are dealing with.

SS: Absolutely. I couldn’t agree more. From your perspective, Andy, how have these trends influenced or created top challenges that sales organizations are facing today? What would you say those top challenges are?

AS: I think it was pretty clear from our research that in terms of when I look at it through the lens of a sales leader and sales enablement space, one of the most consistent challenges that keeps showing its face in the sales space is recruiting and hiring sales talent and the associated challenges with that.

Also, the uncertain economy piece was represented very strongly, generating qualified sales leads continues to be a significant challenge for a lot of organizations. We dive into the skill areas where the key challenges in developing sales skills are relevant in the real-time selling environment. Also, the one which I found unsurprising, but I think some who I’ve spoken to in reflection on the report found surprising, which was the challenge of developing sales managers. Often in the sales enablement space, I see that sales managers are the ones who are most forgotten about. They’re also the ones that are often the loudest in asking, requesting, and demanding skills from their sellers. Often when it comes to developing skills for them to be better managers, it’s something that they’re either left out on, it’s not a focus or it may not be that there’s a budget to focus on developing them.

SS: Absolutely. Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. To that point, especially for our audience, what role can enablement play in helping businesses overcome these challenges?

AS: I think there are three key areas that we’ve really isolated and focused on.